June Nature Journaling: How To Pay Attention at Midsummer
The Calendar Year may get paid commission for purchases made after clicking a link on this page. This website is for inspiration purposes only. The content provided is meant to spark creativity and ideas, not to serve as professional advice or as endorsement.
There’s something strange about June that I didn’t really understand until I started keeping a nature journal. It’s the month that feels most like summer. The longest days. The warmest evenings. Gardens full of roses and bees. And yet, if you’re paying close attention, you start to notice something quietly unsettling underneath all that abundance.
The dawn chorus is already quieting down. The swifts are here, but they won’t be for long. The days are at their longest right now, which means they’re about to start getting shorter. June contains the summer solstice, the peak of the year, and the moment of the peak is also, always, the beginning of the turning away.
I find this genuinely fascinating to sit with. And a nature journal is the perfect place to do it. Because without the record, without the dated entries and the careful observations, you’d never really feel the paradox of June. You’d just enjoy the sunshine. Which is also fine, obviously. But there’s something richer available if you’re willing to pay attention.
The Solstice
The summer solstice falls around the 21st of June in the northern hemisphere. It’s the longest day of the year. The sun rises at its most northerly point on the horizon and sets as far north as it will go. If you marked where the sun set on the spring equinox back in March, go back to the same spot this month and look again. The difference is remarkable.
Midsummer has been celebrated by cultures around the world for thousands of years. In Scandinavia, Midsommar is one of the most important festivals of the year. In many parts of the world, the solstice is marked with fire, flowers, and staying up through the short night. Stonehenge in Wiltshire is famously aligned with the solstice sunrise, and crowds still gather there every year. You can watch a live stream of the sunrise at Stonehenge via the English Heritage website if you can’t be there in person.
For your journal, try to be outside at both sunrise and sunset on the solstice. Note the times. Note where the sun appears and disappears on the horizon. Write about what the light feels like at each end of the day. This is the kind of record that becomes genuinely precious over the years.
What to Look For in June
June is gloriously rich, but as I mentioned, things are starting to shift if you look carefully.
Meadow flowers. June meadows in the UK can be extraordinary. Oxeye daisies, meadow buttercups, red clover, knapweed, and ragged robin, if you’re lucky enough to find a traditionally managed field. Wildflower meadows have declined dramatically in the UK over the last century, so finding a good one is worth celebrating. The Plantlife charity has a meadow finder and brilliant resources on wildflower identification. In North America, June prairies and meadows are similarly spectacular, depending on your region. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is an excellent resource for US readers.
Insects at their peak
June is arguably the best month for insects. Butterflies, bumblebees, hoverflies, beetles, and moths are all active. Meadow browns, large skippers, and common blues are flying in the UK. In North America, swallowtails, fritillaries, and monarchs are on the wing in many regions. Take time to really look at the insects you find. Get close. Watch what they’re doing. A single patch of wildflowers on a warm June afternoon can host an astonishing variety of life.
Dragonflies and damselflies
By June, these are well-established in ponds, rivers, and canals. There are around 57 species in the UK, ranging from the tiny blue-tailed damselfly to the magnificent emperor dragonfly. Learning to tell them apart is a satisfying challenge. The British Dragonfly Society has identification guides and a recording scheme you can contribute to. In North America, the Dragonfly Society of the Americas is the equivalent resource.
Fledglings. Many bird species are now fledging their first broods. Young birds turning up in gardens and parks, slightly fluffy, slightly bewildered, being fed by harassed-looking parents. This is also when lots of people find young birds on the ground and assume they’re injured. In most cases, they’re not. If a fledgling looks alert and uninjured, the best thing to do is leave it where it is. Its parents are almost certainly nearby.
Bats. June evenings are excellent for bats. Warm, insect-rich, with long twilights that give you plenty of time to watch. Go outside around dusk and look along hedgerows, over water, and around streetlights. In the UK, there are 18 species of bat, all of them protected. A bat detector can transform the experience if you want to take it further. The Bat Conservation Trust has a great guide to bat watching for beginners. For North America, Bat Conservation International is the go-to resource.
The Quieting of the Dawn Chorus
I want to come back to something I mentioned at the start. By mid-June, the dawn chorus is noticeably quieter than it was in May. This isn’t because the birds have gone. Most of them are still here, busy with nesting and feeding young. It’s because the main purpose of the song, attracting a mate and defending a territory, has largely been achieved.
If you’ve been listening regularly since February, this shift is one of the most interesting things your journal will record. The build from a single robin in the winter dark to the full May cacophony, and then the gradual quieting back down through June. It’s a complete arc, and you’ve been following it.
On a practical note, June is a good time to try some evening listening as well. As the dawn chorus quiets, the evening becomes more interesting. Blackbirds singing from roof ridges. Swifts screaming overhead. And if you’re in the right place, the extraordinary bubbling call of a nightjar is one of the most atmospheric sounds in the British countryside. The RSPB nightjar page has information about where to find them. In North America, whip-poor-wills and common nighthawks fill a similar twilight niche.
Nighttime Journalling
June’s short nights are a genuine invitation to try something different. I’ve been reading about moth trapping and nighttime nature observation, and it’s opened up a completely new world.
You don’t need a moth trap to get started. Simply leaving an outside light on next to a white sheet on a warm June night will attract moths, and there are hundreds of species in both the UK and North America. The names alone are worth the effort. Burnished brass. Elephant hawk-moth. Beautiful golden Y. They sound like they belong in a fairy tale.
The UK Moths website is an excellent identification resource. For North America, BugGuide and the Butterflies and Moths of North America database are both very useful.
Try writing a nighttime journal entry this month. Go outside after dark. Sit quietly for a while. Let your eyes adjust. Write about what you hear and see. The world at night is as rich as the world by day. It just asks a little more of you.
The Bigger Picture: Noticing Abundance
One of the things I keep coming back to as I research and write this series is how much there is to see when you actually stop and look. June makes this particularly vivid. Stand in a meadow or a good garden for twenty minutes, and the variety of life around you is genuinely staggering. The insects alone, if you counted every species present, would probably surprise you.
And yet most of us walk through June barely noticing any of it. We feel the warmth. We enjoy the flowers in general. But the detail, the texture, the specific and remarkable lives being lived all around us, go unseen.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just the reality of how we move through the world. Which is precisely why the journal practice matters. It’s a commitment to slow down, regularly, and look properly. Not to see everything, but to see something. One thing, clearly, is worth more than a hundred things glimpsed.
The naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham talks about this kind of attentive observation a lot. His WildThings campaign is worth a look if you want to connect with a wider community of people paying closer attention to the natural world.
June Journalling Prompts
One is enough. Really sit with it.
- Be outside at sunrise and sunset on the solstice. Write a journal entry for each. Note the exact times, the position of the sun, the light quality, the temperature, and the sounds.
- Find a patch of wildflowers or a flowering shrub and spend twenty minutes just watching the insects that visit. Try to count how many different species you see.
- Go outside at dusk and watch for bats. Write about the experience. What time did you first see one? What was the light like? Where were they flying?
- Try a nighttime journal entry. Go outside after dark, let your eyes adjust, and write about what you find.
- Compare your journal entries from early May to now. What has changed? What has quieted down? What has appeared for the first time?
- Write about the smell and feel of a warm June evening. What is the quality of the air? What sounds define it for you?
June and the Turning Point
I want to end with the thing I find most interesting about June. It’s the month where the year reaches its fullest expression and simultaneously begins its long turn towards autumn. The light after the solstice changes almost imperceptibly at first. But it changes.
Keeping a journal through June means you get to feel that turning. Not with anxiety, but with attention. You notice the last week of June has a slightly different quality from the first. The evenings cool a little earlier. The swallows are already beginning to gather and chatter before their departure, though that’s still weeks away.
There’s something profound about sitting with that cycle rather than rushing through it. About saying: I notice this moment. I notice the peak and the turning point. I’m here for all of it.
That’s what the journal gives you. Not just a record of what you saw, but a record of being present. And in June, at the height of everything, that feels like a genuinely worthwhile thing to do.
Next month: July, high summer, and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Useful links mentioned in this post:
